Canadian Olympians Owe Gold to Data Visualization

While athletes and sports activities groups around the globe pore over efficiency metrics in an effort to enhance their efficiency and win extra competitions, a brand new issue has come into play this yr as they head to the delayed 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games.

Amid the headlines about medal winners and athletes’ private tales, one other story has overshadowed the video games — COVID-19 cases at the 2020 games throughout this summer season of 2021. While vaccinations have been administered in some elements of the world, the Delta variant of COVID has taken maintain in current months and is inflicting new circumstances of the virus to develop in lots of areas of the world, together with Tokyo, which is now in its fourth state of emergency.

And whereas all the eye proper now could be on the video games happening in Tokyo, there have been months and years of preparation by groups and athletes to prepare for these celebrated two weeks of worldwide competitors. Again, COVID has overshadowed this coaching the final 18 months. How are you able to prepare when your amenities are closed? What must you do if an athlete in your group is contaminated? How a lot down time does an an infection imply? How shortly or slowly must you deliver an athlete again after COVID? Should a group ship athletes overseas to prepare, or is that too dangerous?

These questions and extra have been a few of what athletes and groups prepping for the Tokyo Summer Games have been going through. Because COVID was new, there was no street map for one of the best ways to method coaching throughout this pandemic.

Own the Podium confronted simply this problem. This Canadian non-profit leads the course of funding to high-performance packages to assist Canadian athletes win extra medals on the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It additionally supplies technical steerage and recommendation. But in prepping for the Tokyo Summer video games and the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games subsequent yr the group confronted these new questions round how to finest fulfill its constitution throughout a pandemic.

“We do track athletes’ health, we do have an intake process that would cover illness and disease,” stated Andy Van Neutegem, director of sport science, drugs, and innovation at Own the Podium. “But we’ve never seen anything of this magnitude before.”

Back within the early days of the pandemic, the primary purpose was to develop plans and protocols to return to sports activities and coaching and competitors safely, Own the Podium CEO Anne Merklinger informed DataWeek. Safety was the highest precedence. (For the primary time since its inception, Own the Podium did not set out medal targets for Canadian athletes on the Olympics.)

Anne Merklinger, Own the Podium

Own the Podium needed to arrange danger evaluation instruments that concerned monitoring the variety of infections at completely different ranges of sport after which find a way to use that knowledge to determine tendencies of the place and when infections occurred. Was it in coaching? Was it in competitors? Then it needed to find a way to use these insights to mitigate future infections.

SAS Institute Senior Solutions Advisor Stephen Ondrik helped Own the Podium arrange a sequence of dashboards to visualize the vital knowledge and tendencies. For occasion, throughout coaching, SAS VIYA helped coaches optimize and tailor coaching plans by contemplating environmental components corresponding to climate, geography, and indoor vs outside amenities. It enabled coaches and athletes to re-calibrate if a coaching disruption occurred.
Own the Podium gathered knowledge via COVID testing and likewise questionnaires crammed out by the nationwide sports activities organizations or NSOs. Data collected and visualized included positivity charges, days of coaching misplaced, and symptom profiles.

For occasion, the group needed to take a look at an infection charges of athletes versus nationwide averages, in accordance to Van Neutegem. It seems that athlete an infection charges have been a lot decrease than these of the overall inhabitants.

That info got here in useful throughout coaching. At one level in the course of the pandemic, a facility usually utilized by athletes to prepare was closed down to forestall the unfold of COVID. Merklinger stated that Own the Podium was ready to present knowledge in regards to the low charge of an infection amongst its athletes versus the overall inhabitants to exhibit to facility administration that it might be secure for them to open the power to these athletes for coaching.

Other tracked knowledge included days misplaced to competitions and days misplaced to coaching — components to assist the groups handle the workloads.

“We were thinking of COVID like an injury,” Van Neutegem stated. “You don’t want to rush the athlete back.”

Dr. Andy Van Neutegem, Own the Podium

As the Tokyo video games acquired nearer, the organizations began trying on the several types of assessments used on athletes. For these athletes who had beforehand suffered a COVID an infection, they have been extra possible to get a false optimistic check with sure forms of assessments. Therefore, the group suggested the groups to advocate for using sure assessments deemed extra correct for sure athletes once they acquired to Tokyo.

“Because we’ve been tracking those sports that have had athletes with an infection, we were able to get ahead of the game,” Merklinger stated. “We were more proactive.”

Now Own the Podium has a bunch of information in regards to the impacts of COVID on coaching and competitors for its athletes. The group is planning a full debrief on the Tokyo expertise in October to decide the teachings discovered, what the group did properly, and what might be improved for the longer term.

But most vital is the well being and security of the athletes.

“Safety was our No. 1 priority,” Merlinger stated. “That was all we talked about — we need to protect the health and safety of everyone going to Tokyo. This data helped us do that.”

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Jessica Davis is a Senior Editor at DataWeek. She covers enterprise IT management, careers, synthetic intelligence, knowledge and analytics, and enterprise software program. She has spent a profession masking the intersection of enterprise and expertise. Follow her on twitter: … View Full Bio

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